A year after America put Donald Trump back in office, we asked mayors, activists, artists, and educators about the path forward.
One year ago this week, after a majority of voters returned President Donald Trump to the Oval Office, Black America began steeling itself for the sequel no one wanted and everyone feared. The dreadful previews had been nonstop: Trump’s unabashedly racist campaign rhetoric, his promise to deploy U.S. troops to American “inner cities,” the ominous shadow of Project 2025.
Black leaders nationwide sounded the all-hands alarm, and the resistance to Trump 2.0, in the form of lawsuits and protests, began to take shape. But the dizzying speed of Trump’s actions — and his tidal wave of assaults on the Black community — has been damn near overwhelming.
Anti-Black Blitz
It began, fast and heavy, on Inauguration Day, when Trump issued a flurry of executive orders rolling back civil rights protections, scrubbing Black history from national parks and museums, and gutting the Department of Education. He pivoted to the mass firing of civil servants, sacking a host of Black bureaucrats — including the first Black Librarian of Congress and the National Labor Relations Board’s first Black woman — in the process. And he kept going.
Trump dismissed the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, oversaw an exodus of more than 300,000 Black women from the workforce, and punished elite colleges and law firms that embraced diversity programs. He strong-armed red states into erasing Black congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterms, and he dragged his feet on emergency funding for SNAP and Head Start, anti-poverty programs that ran out of money during the government shutdown.
#WeAreTheResistance #BlackVoicesMatter #FightForJustice
